There’s a great, emblematic exchange in the new movie Gangster Squad, one you’ve surely seen in the film’s TV ads, where Emma Stone, playing a 1940s moll in a crimson dress with a slit up to her hip socket, asks Ryan Gosling’s plainclothes L.A. cop what kinds of games he likes to play. “Post Office,” he replies nonchalantly. “That’s a kids’ game,” she says, dismissing him. “Not the way I play it,” he deadpans, earning an intrigued smile and a raised eyebrow.

Actually, those are pretty hokey lines, at least on paper. On-screen, however, Stone and Gosling hit whatever sweet spot the dialogue has—somewhere between conviction and camp—and the scene sings with smirky, sexy, meat-headed energy, as does most of the rest of the picture, which may be the silliest movie ever to be “inspired by a true story” and also to open with a thug being pulled apart by two cars. It’s the kind of movie that tricks you into thinking it’s better than it is—and it would be better still if the director, Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland and a bunch of stuff for Funny or Die), knew how to shoot and cut action scenes. Still, to my taste, Gangster Squad, which also stars James Brolin and Sean Penn, is among the better comic-book movies of recent years—one, because it maintains a sense of humor about itself, and two, because no one’s wearing tights.

The line about Post Office also underscores what I think distinguishes Gosling as a movie star, aside from his obvious talent. While male stars have been dining out on boyish sex appeal since at least Douglas Fairbanks, and bad boys are a dime a dozen in today’s Hollywood, few bridge quite as wide a gap between youthful eagerness and adult knowing as Gosling does. He’s like a louche puppy dog, the rare actor who has pinchable cheeks as well as cutting-edge cheekbones. No matter how skeevy or seductive, he always exudes a core innocence, which is what made him likable even as a puffed-up lady’s man striking sparks with Stone, again, in Crazy Stupid Love. (If this were the real 1940s, the pair would be sentenced to make a whole string of movies together and we’d all be better off for it. Also, it would be a really bad idea to remake Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but if Scott Rudin or someone were forcing you to, you could do worse than cast Brolin and Gosling, who have their own fine chemistry.)

Part of Gosling’s seeming innocence is in the voice he affects. In interviews he’s said he patterned its nasal, even sniveling pitch after Marlon Brando’s tortured-man-child tones; a blind person listening to either might assume they look like 14-year-old Steve Buscemis. At this point, though, Brando’s become a boring yardstick for young actors. (Doesn’t anyone want to be “the new Kurt Russell”? Maybe Ryan Reynolds?) Gosling has at least one thing over his idol: he’s intentionally funny. I don’t want to go overboard with the dead-star comparisons, but Gosling approaches comedy with an ease that harbors at least a sprinkling of Cary Grant’s glen-plaid magic; Brando tended to approach comedy as if it were mud wrestling, as anyone who has seen The Missouri Breaks can tell you.

Lucky me: I got to enjoy a Gosling double feature this week, also catching him in a contemporary noir,A Place Beyond the Pines, which will be released later this spring. In that film, Gosling plays a character similar to his Gangster Squad cop, another immature guy getting in over his head for the love of a dame, only this time on the other side of the law. I won’t review the latest film here except to say that it takes some admirable narrative risks and that Gosling is the best thing in it, which is saying something since it also stars Bradley Cooper. The director, Derek Cianfrance, who previously directed Gosling in Blue Valentine, puts the star in dyed blond bangs, which makes him look like an eight-year-old except for the scary tattoos on his face and neck. It’s the Gosling duality in extremis.

He does have one serious rival in the sexy-funny man-boy niche: the Baby Huey–ish Channing Tatum. Both are also swoony and droopy-eyed enough to have starred in sappy movies opposite Rachel McAdams: The Notebook, for Gosling, and The Vow, for Tatum. But if Gosling has a little Grant in his DNA guiding him toward the light, Tatum seems weighed down by an extra Sylvester Stallone gene. As Lena Dunham just happened to tweet this morning (a propos of I don’t think anything): “I get the feeling there are a lot of hot bellhops obsessed with the idea that they could have been Channing Tatum.” True! And all the hot desk clerks think they could be Gosling—that’s the difference.

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